Change Propagation in Collaborative Processes Scenarios

Process flexibility and change constitute major challenges for process-aware information systems. This does not only hold for centralized process scenarios, but also for collaborative ones involving multiple distributed and autonomous partners. If one partner adapts its private process, the applied change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Hence the change must be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge is then to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches dealing with changes of collaborative processes are limited with respect to the change operations considered and their dependency on certain process specification languages. By contrast, this paper presents a generic change propagation approach based on the Refined Process Structure Tree. Our approach is applicable independently of a particular process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. Finally, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve structural dependencies for any change pattern

Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios

Change and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

During their lifecycle, business processes are keen to change. Changes either concern the process model structure or the accompanying rules; e.g. compliance rules (laws and regulations). In the context of business process collaborations, several process partners collaborate together, and changing one process might result in knock-on effects on the other processes; i.e., change propagation. Since business processes are often subject to restrictions that stem from laws, regulations or guidelines; i.e., compliance rules, changing them might lead to the violations of these rules (non-compliability). So far, only the impacts of process changes in choreographies have been studied. In this work, we propose an approach that analyzes and evaluates the impacts of process changes on the different compliance rules and inversely, the impacts of compliance rule changes on the process choreography

Decomposition-based Verification of Global Compliance in Process Choreographies

The verification of global compliance rules (GCR) in process choreographies (e.g., partner-spanning quality assurance in supply chains) is crucial and challenging due to the restricted visibility of the private processes of the collaborating partners. This paper provides a novel algorithm that decomposes global compliance rules into assertions that can be verified by the partners in a distributed way without revealing any private process details. The decomposition is based on transitivity properties of the underlying GCR specification. This work uses GCR based on antecedent and occurrence patterns and illustrates the transitivity properties based on their specification in first order predicate logic. It is formally shown that the original GCR can be reconstructed from the assertions, which ensures the viability of the approach. The algorithms are prototypically implemented and applied to several scenarios. The ability of checking global compliance constitutes a fundamental pillar of any approach implementing process choreographies with multiple partners

Ensuring Compliance of Distributed and Collaborative Workflows

Automated workflows must comply with domain-specific regulations, standards and rules. So far, compliance issues have been mainly addressed in the context of intra-organizational workflows. In turn, there exists only little work dealing with compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows. As opposed to intra-organizational workflows, for distributed and collaborative workflows compliance must be addressed at different levels. This includes local compliance rules of a particular partner as well as global compliance rules to be obeyed by multiple partners collaborating in the distributed workflow. As a particular challenge, the private elements of a particular partner workflow are hidden to the partners and hence not known by them. Accordingly, only limited information is available when checking compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows. This paper introduces techniques enabling compliance checking for distributed and collaborative workflows, taking these privacy constraints into account. Hence it enables ensuring compliance of distributed and collaborative workflows at design time